The Only Ketchup You Ever Need

Word has reached our desk that Heinz is about to sell a new, balsamic-flavored ketchup exclusively through Facebook — where it has upwards of 825,000 fans — which adds to its other brand additions like Heinz Hot & Spicy Ketchup with Tabasco, its organic ketchup, its salt-free ketchup, and its green and purple ketchups (those last two have been discontinued).

To which I shrug, "Eh."

For me and most people, the original Heinz "57" ketchup is the one and only ketchup one would ever think of using. Actually, I never have to think of using any other, since Heinz accounts for 59 percent of the ketchup market. (Hunt's, the other ketchup, takes only 15.1 percent.) The stats also say that ketchup is in 97 percent of American homes, and Americans use ketchup in an average of 9.74 meals per week and consume 1.3 bottles per person per month.

Heinz, in other words, is like Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, Golden Blossom Honey, Gulden's Mustard, and Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce — iconic American brands everyone buys and just sticks in the cupboard. None of those brands have been dumb enough to foist radical changes on a wholly contented public with products like New Coke and Crystal Pepsi. No one ever asked for such products and no one wants any change whatsoever in a perfect condiment like Heinz ketchup, which seems as inextricable from burgers and fries and lots of other foods as does a red bowtie from Pee-wee Herman or portholes from a Buick (they still have those, right?).

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Heinz history begins in 1876 when Henry Heinz, a horseradish and pickle manufacturer, was riding a train in New York City and spotted a sign advertizing 21 shoe styles. Heinz liked the slogan and adapted it to his own condiments products. Although he actually made 60 varieties, he thought "57" was a lucky number and stuck it on his bottles. By 1907, he was selling 12 million bottles per year and exporting to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Today, Heinz sells 650 million bottles a year.

Still, Heinz did not make the first ketchup, a word for a variety of condiments containing tomato and pickle, from the Chinese ketsiap, meaning pickled fish sauce, popular among English sailors. The word first appeared in English print in 1690. Recipes for ketchup or catsup can readily be found in 19th-century cookbooks, but when Heinz hit the market, its ketchup became so popular and so associated with the condiment that people pretty much stopped making their own.

Soldiers carried ketchup into war. In the series Band of Brothers, an Italian-American G.I. tells his clueless Midwestern mess-hall buddies that their spaghetti dinner isn't really Italian: "They just poured ketchup on top," he says. Indeed, so indelible was the connection between ketchup and the American appetite that the French always made it a point to insult American taste by citing "le ketchup" as the lowest item on the food chain. I kid you not: When I was 18 years old, on my first trip to France, I dared to order ketchup with my pommes frites and was handed a bill with two separate charges on it: one for the ketchup, the other "to bring zee ketchup to your table, monsieur."

Back in the early 1980s, Heinz tried to make its ketchup sexy by having Carly Simon sing "Anticipation" over a commercial showing how slowly and sensually the stuff oozed out of its glass bottle (which, as everyone knows, you must rap on the image of "57" to get flowing). During the Reagan administration, in an effort to cut money from school lunch budgets, the Secretary of Agriculture proposed classifying ketchup as a vegetable — easily the worst instance of trickle-down economics.

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Since then, except for those occasional product enhancements, Heinz ketchup has remained resolutely pure, as ubiquitous at home as in a diner, so beloved by so many that it's never given a thought because everyone just expects it to be on the table, like salt and pepper.

Its virtues are radiantly evident: It has the sweet taste and tanginess of ripe tomatoes, with a little bite; its color is a very beautiful, deep red; and its texture is a perfect balance of flow and stasis. It mingles with all manners of food, not least the ingredients lavished on a hamburger, and French fries are unthinkable without it.

Of course, a lot of horse's-ass chefs have in recent years decided it's a cool idea to vary and improve on the taste of Heinz, coming up with their own condiments, which are always too strong-tasting, with added herbs and chiles, and always seemingly brown. Who could possibly care about such unwarranted innovations?

Frankly, Hunt's ketchup or the generic store brands might taste pretty close to Heinz, but I've never had the vaguest notion of trying them. As a kid, I took Heinz for granted. Now, whenever I use it, I think it's one of the few things in the world brought to such an honest state of perfection, and I'm real happy about that.

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